


the irony of fate

by mikkey_bones



Category: Marvel, Marvel 616
Genre: BuckyNat Secret Santa, Canon Compliant, Chocolate, Established Relationship, F/M, Growing Up, Light Angst, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 05:35:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9221291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/pseuds/mikkey_bones
Summary: Natalya and the soldier share a stolen New Year's gift, and Natalya reflects on the many things that are not hers to want.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookworm213](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookworm213/gifts).



> A Secret Santa gift for [natashkabarnes](http://natashkabarnes.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, for the prompt "Christmas in the Red Room."
> 
> New Year's celebrations basically replaced Christmas after 1935 in the USSR (complete with a non-Christmas tree!). The title for this fic is also taken from the Soviet New Year's hit comedy movie "The Ironies of Fate." And, finally, I always have a hard time figuring out what Bucky would be called during his time in the Red Room. I didn't think he'd be called James, really, because his handlers wouldn't want to trigger memories of his old life. I also shy away from "Yakov/Yasha" for [these reasons](http://wintergaydar.tumblr.com/post/71487710917/hello-class-today-i-would-like-to-tell-you-why). Ultimately I decided on just calling him "the soldier," and I figured Natasha would stick with that because her life has been pretty weird; why question someone being named "the soldier"?
> 
> Anyway. Enjoy!

Vasily Andreivich and his family were away this evening, eating dinner at his wife's mother's home. Everything in the apartment was as they left it: the lights turned off, a ceramic pot of stew cooling on the stove, the fir tree in pride of place near the dining table.

Natalya worked without turning the lights on, a flashlight held between her teeth as she lifted up paintings, checked under desk drawers, and pulled back the rugs on the floor. General Lukin suspected Andreivich of treason, and this was their first opportunity to investigate the major's papers, looking for anything with the Russian state seal. As she worked, she counted silently in her head, keeping track of how many seconds she had been here. Lukin suspected Andreivich of treason, but he was not _certain_ , and until they knew where the man stood, it was imperative not to let him know that he was suspected. Everything in the apartment must be left as she found it.

“ _Everything is going well,_ lisichka?” The soldier's voice was more gravelly than usual through her earpiece; the connection was rough.

“I am fine,” she said. The main rooms were clear, obviously. She moved into the bedrooms—there were two—starting with the one that Andreivich shared with his wife. She rifled methodically through the papers in the desk, then checked the furniture itself for any secret compartments. Nothing. Then she checked the closet, expertly picking the lock on the small safe he had inside.

“He is hoarding gold and jewelry,” she murmured to the soldier.

“ _Who isn't?_ ” the soldier replied, and Natalya bit back a smile.

“Understood,” she replied, closing the safe. She checked the rest of the closet, but, again, there was nothing. The paintings and mirrors were next, then the insides of Andreivich's drawers and the bottom of the dresser. The bed, the mattress… she even ran her hands along the seams in the wallpaper.

“Moving to the children's rooms,” she told the soldier.

“ _You have time_ ,” he assured her.

“If Andreivich is truly a traitor,” Natalya began, feeling a bubble of discontent rise in her throat.

“ _Not now_ ,” the soldier told her.

Natalya shut her mouth, but that sour feeling was still there, and doubled when she headed past the living room again, glimpsing the fir tree in all its stately splendor. It gave off a sharp, exotic smell of pine and forest snow, strange against the homely aromas of stew and mildewed carpet.

“Lisichka _, I can see you_ ,” the soldier murmured into her earpiece.

“Leave me alone,” Natalya muttered and knew that the solider could hear her, and also knew that she sounded like a child. She ducked into the shared children's room, but, again, there was nothing there. The last place left was the bathroom, but who would be stupid enough to hide important documents in there?

Well. If Andreivich truly was stupid enough to be a traitor, who knew what other foolish things he would do?

“There is nothing here,” Natalya said after she went through each of the rooms again to double check.

“ _Then head out. I am here_ ,” the soldier said.

Natalya hesitated a moment, looking over the living room. She wondered how bright and cheerful the apartment would be once lights were on and the cold candles on the table were lit. In spite of the tawdry china, the mildewed smell, the peeling wallpaper… it would be beautiful.

“ _Natalya_ ,” the soldier said. He was usually patient with her, but Natalya heard an edge of frustration in his voice.

She turned around and without thinking, grabbed a shiny square of wrapped chocolate from the bowl on top of a low cupboard. She slipped the chocolate into one of the inner pockets of her suit, where it rested like a cool reminder against her heart.

“I'm coming.”

*

Natalya had known it was December 31, obviously, but the significance of the date hadn't struck her until she had set out with the soldier earlier in the evening, as the sun began to sink low over the horizon. Windows of the blocky apartment buildings of Moscow had lit up one by one, golden squares of light against the encroaching darkness, some of them half blocked by the triangular silhouette of the winter fir tree.

Any one of these windows could have been hers, in another lifetime. She could have been lighting candles while the Soldier cut a roast and a chubby, smiling child played in front of—

A child? _Their_ child? The thought had been so absurd that it had broken Natalya out of her little reverie, and her half-formed wish (for peace, for warmth, for light) had gone up in smoke like a scented incense prayer, or like the breath she could see drifting from their mouths in the cold.

“It's here,” the soldier had said, slowing in front of an apartment block just like any other as he placed a hand on Natalya's upper arm. Like a good escort. A husband. Natalya had breathed out through her nose and fixed the sleeves of her warm wool coat, turning towards him and reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck, pulling him close like she was saying goodbye for the night.

“It's New Year's Eve,” she'd murmured into his ear.

He'd kissed her cheek. “' _S novym godom, lisichka_.”

*

In the doorway to Andreivich's apartment, she shrugged her wool coat back on and jammed her hat down over her curls. Hurrying down the five flights of stairs, she looked just like any other young woman rushing to meet her lover. The soldier stepped out of the shadows when she exited the apartment, the cold air tingling like little pinpricks on her exposed skin.

“You took a long time in there,” he murmured.

“I was being thorough,” she said.

“You were angry.”

At one point, Natalya would have lied to the soldier, assured him that no, of course, nothing she did for the Room angered her, as it was simply her duty. But she was older now, and perhaps not wiser but certainly _different_. Lies that were meant for the soldier seemed to stick in her throat. He told the truth when he could, and she owed it to him to do the same. Instead she said, “It's a holiday.”

The soldier glanced down at her, his gray eyes pensive. “It is,” he agreed, in the tone that invited her to elaborate.

Natalya sighed through her nose—again—and slipped her fingers through the crook in his elbow. He was a warm and comforting weight next to her. Trainer. Friend. Lover. Everything. “I wish,” she began, glancing up at one of those warm windows. Inside, there was another world.

The soldier touched her hand, cutting her off. He never talked about his own wishes, and unless she pressed him he would not even voice his own desires, as if afraid that, as the words left his mouth, they would be snatched away and twisted, taken from him forever. It made Natalya feel sick and angry, but on a deeper level, she thought that she understood.

If thoughts were simply in your head, they were safe. You were safe. The moment when you spoke those thoughts aloud, turned them into actions, they became dangerous.

“You're right,” she told him even though he hadn't spoken. “You always are.”

“That is not true,” he murmured, but he sounded amused.

“I know it's not, but it is a holiday, and I must be nice to you,” Natalya said, and felt rather than heard the soldier laugh. Although he rarely smiled, he had a good sense of humor. It matched hers. Natalya sometimes wondered who had given it to whom. Had she taught him how to laugh? Had he let her steal all his jokes?

Had the Room—deliberately or accidentally—given this gift to them both?

They walked through the streets arm in arm, just one of many carefree couples taking a walk in the crisp, cold air before the dinners and the television specials and the holiday movies. They had no pick-up; they were to make their own way back to the Room facilities. The only requirement was to arrive before 2000 hours. Natalya knew there was a tracker in the fabric of her coat, and more than likely one in the soldier's metal arm, but this time to themselves, relatively speaking, still felt like a New Year's gift.

Which reminded her. “I have a present for you,” she said, unbuttoning the top button of her wool coat and sliding her hand inside her suit.

The soldier looked down at her with interest, but Natalya was already making a disappointed face. “It melted!” she said, pulling out the now softened and squishy square of chocolate.

“ _Chocolate_?” the soldier asked. Sometimes he spoke to her in American English instead of Russian, and, since he taught her the language in the first place, Natalya barely noticed the change. Now was one of those times.

“I didn't think it would melt!” Natalya said and hated how she sounded petulant and upset at the same time. She was a fool. She should have known. She'd had chocolate before. The first time she'd ever eaten it, as a child, she had wanted to savor it, and she'd only taken tiny bites, keeping the rest so long in her hands that it had turned into a liquid mess.

The soldier gave a quiet, almost soundless laugh as he took the square carefully anyway. Melted chocolate stuck to the wrapper as he unfolded it. “That's alright, _lisichka_. It's still good,” he assured her, bringing the wrapper to his mouth and scraping some of the chocolate off with his teeth.

Natalya watched. For a moment, as he took a bite, the soldier looked—different. Something passed over his face; a shadow or a ray of light, Natalya wasn't sure. He seemed younger, less guarded, happier… almost. It made her heart ache.

“Is it good?” she asked, and she could hear the reverent awe in her voice.

The soldier looked at her for a moment with that same distant-yet-present expression in his eyes, and then seemed to come back down to earth. “Yes,” he said and his lips twitched a little, the closest he usually came to a smile.

There was chocolate on his lower lip. Natalya reached up to wipe it off with her thumb. He kissed her finger, sending a pleasant shiver of delight down her spine, and in response she leaned up to kiss him.

He tasted like chocolate. She loved him.

And he loved her, Natalya knew; she could read the naked emotion in his eyes as she settled back down from her stance on tiptoes. They didn't need to say it. This was one of those thoughts that was dangerous whether you spoke it aloud or not.

*

One night in November the soldier had had a dream. It had been one of those rare nights that they had been able to spend curled close together, this time on a too-small camp bed in a safehouse in Kiev.

Natalya had been awake because she was getting too hot under the blankets with the soldier curled up tight around her. He had a higher than normal body temperature, and it was a rare treat to be so warm in the winter while she slept. She hadn't wanted to disturb him, so she simply lay still, listening to him breathe. But the soldier had been starting to stir anyway, his breathing getting faster, harsher.

“Steve,” he'd croaked out and Natalya hadn't known what language he was speaking until he added, “ _Dammit_ ,” a moment later. English. American English.

In the Room, when Natalya was younger and part of a class of twenty-eight, when the soldier was still simply their distant trainer, some of the other girls had said he was simply a highly-trained Russian spy, perhaps an undercover agent that they had sent to the United States and brought back. But Natalya had always been sure that he truly was American. That was why he was one of the pinnacles of Soviet glory: not simply because he was the perfect Russian soldier, but because he had once been one of their mortal enemies, and was now the deadly right hand of the KGB.

“Dammit,” the soldier had said again, beginning to thrash on the mattress. “ _Shit_.” Before she could get pushed out of the bed, Natalya had quickly disengaged herself, standing up and letting the cold air raise goosebumps on her warm skin.

“No,” the soldier had moaned with more terror and anger in his voice than Natalya had ever heard. “No, please.” He was having a nightmare and she should wake him up, she knew. But she wanted to understand what he was dreaming about.

“No!” the soldier had said again, louder, and had thrashed so much that, tangled in the blankets, he fell to the floor.

The noise had shaken Natalya out of her daze ad she hurried to his side. “Soldier,” she'd murmured, her voice low, and she'd touched his naked chest, his lips, and finally rested her hand against his cheek. “Wake up, _mili moi_.”

The soldier had woken up with her touch, but there was no recognition in his eyes as he stared at Natalya. He was someone else, trapped in a straightjacket of blankets, trying to figure out where to go.

Natalya had frowned. “Who are you?” _Who were you?_

He'd gasped, sucking in air like his life depended on it. “Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. Three two five five—”

That was enough. Natalya had felt a bitter pang of sadness (loss?) in her chest before she'd slapped his cheek lightly, then caressed his forehead. “ _Mili moi_. Wake up. Please.”

The soldier had woken up.

*

As Natalya stepped away from the kiss, the soldier held out the unwrapped, melting chocolate in the square palm of his hand. “Try some,” he offered.

“I don't like chocolate,” Natalya said, not because she truly didn't like it but because sometimes, eating chocolate was too much for her. It was too decadent. Strange on her tongue.

“ _Lisichka_ ,” the soldier said. He could see through her lie, like she really was a little fox, and Natalya bit back a grin, reaching out to carefully take the square from his hand.

“That's better.”

It was difficult to take a bite of the chocolate, melted as it was, without dirtying her hands and face. As soon as Natalya put her face to the wrapper she knew that she'd gotten chocolate on her nose, but she didn't wipe it before she grinned up at the soldier, and was rewarded for her impertinence by a surprised chuckle.

He reached out to wipe her nose with his thumb. She caught his wrist and pulled it down to her lips, pressing a chocolate-flavored kiss to his thumb. His eyes were smiling.

They looked like any other young couple out tonight, Natalya reflected, her grip loosening a little on his wrist as she stared up at him. Except that they were both weapons, killers, and she had been raised like that since she was a child and he didn't know his true name except when he dreamed. She thought again of her little fantasy, of the apartment, the kitchen, the tree (the child).

She thought, with a sour feeling rising in her throat, of the way he had looked at her without even knowing her, when she'd woken him from his dream in November. What would she give, to have a different life with him? What could she sacrifice? Of course, there was no point in asking the question. It was an impossible dream. But what if…?

“Do you ever think—” she began.

“No,” the soldier said before she could finish, disengaging his hand from her grip. But she saw the truth in his eyes. “It's too dangerous, _lisichka_. Don't start.”

But Natalya wanted to start, and she wanted to _finish_ with this, and she felt all the frustration from earlier in the day along with the weight of the cast-off dreams and the heat of her anger, engulfing her like a sudden wave. She threw the chocolate away thoughtlessly, into the street. “ _Everything_ is dangerous! _We_ are dangerous, soldier, and if you do not understand that then you are more foolish than I have ever been!”

“Natalya.”

The icy wind scoured her hot cheeks and she could pretend that the prickles in her eyes were simply tears from the cold as she stomped away.

“ _Natalya_.” He sounded exasperated. She kept walking.

(If she had been looking at him, she would have seen him hesitate before following her, looking into the street where the metallic, golden chocolate wrapper glimmered, face up, like a mirror to the square apartment windows above them. Warm. Inaccessible. But she did not look.)

When he grabbed her upper arm, Natalya was not surprised. She could have shaken him off, kicked him away and kept going. She would have been able to elude him in the darkened Moscow streets until they reached the rendezvous point. But she didn't. Instead, she stiffened up and made him work to drag her into an alleyway, out of plain view.

“Natalya,” he said sternly. “You are letting your emotions overwhelm you. Why are you so angry?”

“Why _aren't_ you?” she replied, her voice getting higher pitched as she spoke in exactly the way that she hated. She sounded like a foolish girl of twenty, not—not like the Black Widow, the jewel of the Red Room, the only survivor of Rodchenko's procedures. She balled her hands in her fists and turned to glare up at the soldier, ignoring the warning prickle of tears in her eyes.

His expression—sad, solemn—might have saddened her, if she was in a different kind of mood. Right now, it inflamed her, made her want to lash out at him and herself and everything and everyone. “Why don't you _want_ anything!” She balled her hands into fists and hit his chest, not trying to hurt him, really; he grabbed her wrists.

“Because I can't,” he said, and Natalya felt her eyes get hot as her breath hitched in a quickly stifled sob. “I want you,” he added after a beat, letting go of Natalya's wrists to fold her into his chest.

Natalya let him, burying her face in his warm and slightly scratchy wool coat as he held her close. Her eyes would be all red when she pulled away, and the soldier's coat would be wet. For now, she let him cradle her close and stroke her hair like she was a child. Right now she felt like a child, angry and hurting and frustrated, controlled by forces she didn't understand.

He kept holding her until her shoulders stopped shaking and she had gotten herself under control, and then his grip loosened. Natalya risked peeking up at him. He was looking down at her. She didn't know anymore how to say the right thing, or what could smooth this over. And he wasn't going to help her with that. Natalya didn't know if he could.

Finally, she swallowed so that her voice wouldn't quaver (it did anyway, just a little), and said, “I'm sorry I threw the chocolate away.”

His solemn expression turned lighter, the corners of his mouth lifting and the edges of his eyes crinkling in a little smile. “It is forgiven. I'm sorry I—”

There was nothing for him to apologize for. Nothing that wasn't someone else's fault. It was her turn to reach up place her fingers on his cheek, resting her thumb against that sweet dimple in his chin. “Shh,” she said. “Don't.”

The soldier gave Natalya an understanding look and brought his hands up to wipe the leftover tears from under her eyes in a gentle caress. Natalya leaned into the touch, and he kissed her then, as gently as he ever did anything when it came to her.

“You'll have a chance to steal me another chocolate bar, I'm sure,” he murmured against her lips, and Natalya, her eyes closed, had to smile. That was both a secret and a promise.

Later, when they stepped out of shadowed alleyway, Natalya felt better. More present. It was New Year's, and they were together, and her lips were still warm with the memory of his kisses, and their mouths still tasted like the chocolate that she had stolen, their small, private New Year's celebration.

Maybe one day she would tell him about her dream, with the fir and the kitchen and the child. Maybe one day she would tell him about his dream, about the secret name that he had uttered in his sleep. Maybe one day, when they were old and gray and still together, still fighting…

But, Natalya thought as she let her fingers twine with the soldier's metal ones, the coldness of his hand radiating through his glove, even that was probably too much to ask for as a New Year's gift.


End file.
